


Grief (Whumptober 2020)

by twofrontteethstillcrooked



Series: Whumptober [4]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Mutual Pining, snippetfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:33:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27105772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofrontteethstillcrooked/pseuds/twofrontteethstillcrooked
Summary: "What she showed me, I." The words stuck. He pried and a few more came loose. "There's another universe, or timeline -- another Earth with another us." Clark took a shallow breath; an echo of pain cracked against his sternum. "And in it, I'm everything you've ever feared I could become."
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Series: Whumptober [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1975861
Comments: 2
Kudos: 85





	Grief (Whumptober 2020)

"Could you tell me what happened?" Bruce asked.

Clark paused to consider the question, or, rather, the shape of it. In the kitchen at the lake house, steel and black marble surfaces dimly glittered from the glow of a single lamp on the windowsill. He didn't need light to see by, but he found himself almost desperately curious to parse Bruce's inquiry and, in the effort, to watch Bruce for some further clue. 'Could' had been proffered. The chosen form wasn't an order. Bruce's posture spoke of ease, as though he asked nothing tasking from the barstool opposite the one Clark sat in. What did Bruce assume he'd say; what would be the subsequent result for any given response?

Clark was rarely bothered by inclement weather. The hollow feeling in his chest was not caused by the extant temperature of the room.

“I understand Diana's the one who's concerned," he said, "and it's on me to reassure her--"

"We're all concerned." Bruce held up a hand before Clark could protest. "We know Circe didn't hurt you physically, other than throwing you into animated suspension for a few minutes to keep you busy. We don't think your ability to do your job has been compromised. We're not." He stopped and looked at Clark. "We are not worried about that." 

It seemed to Clark that Bruce struggled, just a little, on the word 'we'. 

"Circe showed me something," Clark said, feeling some part of himself begin to slip out of kilter, as if he were sinking beneath a sheet of ice, paralyzed. "Not a dream, nor a hallucination." He cleared his throat. "Or I don't think it was." 

_Two heartbeats silenced, blackened agony gaping in him wide and infinite._

Bruce had gone motionless, watching Clark with dismay plain in his expression. Bruce hated missing things, Clark knew; he would hold himself personally responsible if something had harmed Clark and he hadn't even known to try to prevent it.

Clark didn't have the energy to bear the way Bruce was looking at him, not with having slept at most no more than an hour or two at a stretch for going on two weeks. Easily remedied. He closed his eyes. 

"What she showed me, I." The words stuck. He pried and a few more came loose. "There's another universe, or timeline -- another Earth with another us." Clark took a shallow breath; an echo of pain cracked against his sternum. "And in it, I'm everything you've ever feared I could become."

He squeezed his eyes shut more tightly. His fingertips dug into his palms. 

"Whatever you think you were shown, you're not him." Bruce spoke at a pace so steady it had to be deliberate. "Clark," he said, his voice just a little sharper on the name. "You must know that." 

"It doesn't make the people he's killed less dead." Clark wanted to spit the words out like blood, but instead he'd barely raised his voice. He knew Bruce would hear anyway.

"And that's what you've been grieving," Bruce said. "That other world." 

Clark shook his head. He finally opened his eyes, to Bruce waiting with as much patience as Clark had ever witnessed from him. 

"It should be, I guess. Those victims deserve to be mourned." Clark uncurled his fingers, kept his stare on the furrows in his palms. His lungs were filled to drowning. Saltwater stung the back of his throat, his eyes. "The other me. He loses his family. It… Everything he does afterwards is because they die at his hands, or that's his excuse, anyway." 

He could feel, at the furthest edge of his senses, the way Bruce was counting his own breaths to keep from interrupting, how intensely he was listening. Clark knew it should have been a comfort, but there were all these words left, a chain of them winding around his chest in a vise as crushing as Circe's magic had ever hoped to be. 

Because Bruce was being kind and because he was his best friend, Clark managed to say, "I keeping thinking about how when I was a kid, I was scared of everything. Of being found out, of what people might do to me. Of hurting someone accidentally." Words like ropes, like rusted nails, like knives that would flay humans with the lightest pressure. "Maybe most of all, I was scared I would never have a family of my own." 

He was almost out of air. He inhaled shakily. Too late to quit. 

"I knew my parents loved me; I knew Lana and Pete loved me. The idea that I'd never find anybody to share my life with -- it was sorta more terrible than I could even let myself think about." He gave a small laugh. His cheeks were wet, and Bruce's eyes were too dark to look into. "But for all that, I never thought. I never thought it might be better if I didn't find...if it really was dangerous for people to be with me…"

As a writer, Clark weighed words constantly and therefore understood their limitations. Sometimes, however, they were all that was left of the truth. 

"I'm a weapon," he said, the words tumbling out like flat stones he wouldn't be able to budge once they landed. He'd closed his eyes again. "I'm not supposed to be someone's home." 

There was a noise only Clark's abilities would've caught, as though a thin blade had been cleanly slid into the most vulnerable point beneath a ribcage. He didn't catch up quickly enough to realize he himself wasn't the one who'd made the sound before Bruce said, "You haven't eaten much recently."

Clark blinked. "What?"

Bruce's expression had changed to open, neutral, downright placid. "Food, Clark."

"Ah. No. I haven't been hungry." Clark shifted on the barstool. He blinked again, wiped his face, clasped his hands together. Some strange veiled heaviness had been lifted from his peripheral vision, from his shoulders and hips. 

Bruce was stretching his legs and standing up, headed a few feet to the large refrigerator. "I should call your fretful mother and tell her you're wasting away."

"Don't. Guilt tripping me by invoking my mom is dirty pool." Was this what whiplash felt like? Clark wondered. He couldn't remember. "You don't have patrol tonight?"

"It's raining," Bruce said, like something as common in Gotham as rain was a well-known Batman deterrent.

Clark hadn't noticed the water sheeting down the windows, nor the insistent drum of a downpour on the roof; probably not the best sign of mental stability. "Pizza'd be all right, if ChowWagon will deliver out this far."

"They would. I'm Bruce Wayne," Bruce said with the flair he usually reserved for taking the piss with reporters who weren't Clark. He tugged open the bottom freezer drawer and removed a large disc. "But we already have pizza."

"Convenient. Alfred?"

"Hn. I can forage for sustenance all on my own." Bruce poked at the oven display. "I can even toss a crust and slow-simmer a red sauce." He picked at an edge of plastic wrap until he figured out how to unwrap the pizza and made a cagey face at Clark for a second. "Don't suppose you'd care to share who other-you was married to."

Clark suppressed a groan. He sighed and said, "Lois. You absolutely cannot mention it to her, ever."

Bruce quirked up an eyebrow. "Noted."

"It's not-- She's great." Clark winced. Well, she was. She was one of his smartest, scariest friends. He hadn't been anguished specifically about her counterpart's death in another reality, or even the thought of her and a child they might have together dying because of him. His grief, he'd discovered, was less bound to them, there, and more rooted in his own terror in this world. "I'm keeping this info in my arsenal, for future occasions where she's so mad at me she's about to kill me."

Bruce's other eyebrow appeared to have an opinion on the matter.

"I'm counting on being able to make her laugh hard enough to forget why she's about to kill me," Clark said.

"Good plan." As Bruce placed the twelve inch pie on the middle rack, he said, all mildness, "You know why your conclusion that 'Being alone forever is best' is bullshit."

It didn't seem like the kind of not-question he needed Clark to answer. 

"First," Bruce said, "to merely temporarily remove you from action, a powerful sorceress tortured you for one hundred and eighty-nine seconds with visions of another universe the existence of which you cannot possibly be expected to either confirm or ameliorate. Second, whoever you saw in those visions who looked like you isn't you. Worth repeating. Third, you are not responsible for him." 

Clark didn't quite believe him, and didn't quite trust Bruce believed such logic either. But Clark could let him finish his lecture. Bruce had opened the long fridge door and taken out two beers in bottles. He gave one to Clark, pausing for a second as if making sure Clark was paying attention. He sat back on his barstool, and Clark clutched at the cold glass with both hands.

"Fourth. There aren't any guarantees about what may or may not happen to anyone who becomes part of your family," Bruce said, like it wasn't the biggest understatement he could utter. "You meet people every day who've suffered the worst, most unimaginable tragedies, sometimes of their own doing, and they take that pain and loss and accomplish astonishing things with it. They found non-profits and fund scholarships, serve their sentences, advocate for victims' rights or new legislation. They get better. They live to honor their loved ones. Most people, in mourning or otherwise, don't become homicidal despots. You're not as strong as them?" He took a drink of beer in a manner that Clark would describe as almost smug.

Clark thought about both pinching and hugging him. The heaviness in his shoulders had come back. He was hunched forward, trying to breathe against it. He wasn't sure he was even strong enough to keep having this one conversation.

When Bruce spoke again, there was no trace of arrogance in his tone. "What are we up to, fifth? Fifth, not to be mean about who you were as a kid, but." He tapped his fingernail against his bottle. His thoughts on Kansas farm life and Clark's once-upon-a-time place therein had been the source of delicate ribbing as long as they'd known each other's real identities. 

Bruce gave a rueful head tilt. "You missed a key element of the bigger picture when you were younger and you're doing it now, and not just because of course you, you specifically, are supposed to have a family." His voice sounded a little odd. But then he went on, turning so that he was looking out the window. "One person isn't really a family." More softly, he said, "If you decide to keep everyone away, it also means you're keeping out someone who might want to be _your_ home."

Clark's hands seemed too stiff. He put the beer on the counter to keep from shattering the bottle and opened his hands, feeling the cold lift away from them. When he looked at Bruce's profile, he saw him exhale very, very slowly, as though he were lowering to the ground something immense but easily fractured. Clark heard the rain on the metal roof of a barn seventeen miles away and the ticking the oven made as it came up to full temperature. He waited until Bruce looked over at him again. He sat perfectly still and held his gaze as gently as he could. The minutes passed between them, quiet, shadowed, and warm, until Clark was able to find a place to start whatever was to come next.

"What's on the pizza?" he asked eventually, not bothering to be embarrassed at the roughness in his voice.

Bruce smiled small at the corner of his mouth. "Mushrooms, tomatoes, green olives. Asiago with extra mozzarella." 

An order in a greasy pizzeria years ago, the two of them battle-wearied and starving at three a.m. One of the first times, perhaps, Clark had sat across from Bruce and thought of him as anything more than a teammate. 

"My favorite," Clark said, reaching for Bruce's wrist.

"I know," Bruce said, letting him.

**Author's Note:**

> This is definitely a snippety snippetfic, posted originally on my tumblr. I reserve the right to revisit it and turn it into a real -- or at least longer? -- story some day, maybe. :)


End file.
